Pete Dye stepped to the first tee at Crooked Stick Golf Club and smoked a drive down the middle. It was a shot a 78-year-old has no business hitting.
“Fairways are too wide,” he cracked to a delighted group watching him on a July morning.
For anybody who has played a Pete Dye-designed golf course or has been in one of his pot bunkers or has dunked one after missing one of his trademark island greens such a comment isn’t surprising. After all, a lot of golfers say he’s Dye-abolical.
When the PGA Championship is played this week at Whistling Straits, his masterpiece that hugs two miles of Lake Michigan shoreline near Kohler, Wis., there likely will be some moaning and groaning about its difficulty. But Dye said he didn’t build the course for owner Herb Kohler to torture golfers.
“It’s for fun,” said Alice Dye, his wife and business partner of more than 54 years. “We want them to play well. I hope at Whistling Straits there are four or five people who shoot 4, 5 under par. That shows you have a good, playable golf course.”
This has been a big year for the Dyes, who were married in 1950 on Groundhog Day, the coldest day in February that year. In the spring, Alice was named the PGA of America’s “First Lady of Golf.” Pete will be given the PGA’s Distinguished Service Award Wednesday at the Milwaukee Theatre. Having the PGA Championship at Whistling Straits completes quite a threesome.
The Dyes, whose sons P.B. and Perry are prominent course designers, met at Florida’s Rollins College in 1945. Alice, who grew up in Indianapolis, was a sophomore on the golf team and Ohio-born-and-raised Pete was a recently discharged paratrooper looking to play golf and get an education. She pursued him.
“He was the cutest man I’d ever seen,” said Alice, a past president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects.
They married on that cold day four years later. The Dyes got into the insurance business and were successful. But if their money was in insurance, their hearts were in golf.
They built their first course, El Dorado Golf Club in Indianapolis, in 1960 and did everything themselves. The nine-hole layout crossed a creek 13 times. A year later, they built their first 18-hole course, Heather Hills, and Pete Dye Inc. was born.
Whistling Straits is one of 40 courses the Dyes have worked on together and the third to play host to a PGA Championship. The others are Oak Tree Golf Club in Edmond, Okla. (1988), and Crooked Stick (1991). Crooked Stick also was the site of the 1993 U.S. Women’s Open.
They also designed the famed Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, S.C., which played host to the 1991 Ryder Cup.
Pete Dye, who dropped out of high school to join the Army, is a wiry little guy who loves to tell a story. Clad in his usual khaki pants and blue button-down shirt with “PD” embroidered on the pocket (“The cleaners say, `Mr. Dye’s uniforms are ready,'” Alice said with a laugh), he’s a man of action.
Dye, who doesn’t have a high school degree, invented the term golf course designer. He is a hands-on guy who has moved millions of yards of dirt himself and learned the business through experience. He’s busier than any two people should be.
“He’s got a genius,” said Kohler, who didn’t play golf until his Blackwolf Run courses were built in Kohler, Wis. “He can compete against the best design teams in the world. They use all sorts of computers. Pete doesn’t use a computer. He’s a pure artist.”
Alice, called “Ally” by her husband, is the player in the family. Although Pete is a former state high school and amateur champion who played in the 1957 U.S. Open, his wife has a more glittering resume. Like her husband, she has found time to write a book, “From Birdies to Bunkers.”
Among her credits are two U.S. Senior Amateur titles, a U.S. Curtis Cup team berth, three Florida State amateur titles, nine Indiana state amateur titles and 11 Women’s Golf Association of Metropolitan Indianapolis titles.
She has been a board member of the Women’s Western Golf Association since she was 23, and was the PGA of America’s first female board member.
In June, she qualified for the WGAMI championship flight and defeated the medalist in the first round before losing her next match.
“Ally has played golf and has been a great golfer all her life,” said Pete Dye, who leaves the financial details to his wife. “She has played golf with Babe Zaharias, Mickey Wright and on up the line to the great players of today. She has played with the great men’s players for years. And she has played with the average lady who shoots 120. Alice, like any golfer, has her opinion. We’ve crossed paths a few times, but I certainly want to go on record to say I listen to Alice. She’s done it. You have to listen.”
Dye courses are prominent on every top-100 list–public, private or resort–from Golf Digest to Golf to Golfweek. They have created some of the game’s most memorable and feared holes, including the island green at the Tournament Players Club in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. The Dyes take pride in the playability of their courses from the middle and forward tees.
PGA magazine once described Pete Dye as “the most loved, hated and imitated golf course architect of the past 50 years.” Dye, whose book is entitled “Bury Me in a Pot Bunker,” said he thinks hate is a bit strong.
“My golf courses get more play than anyone,” he said. “I don’t put bunkers in front of the greens. You can roll a ball on. My fairways are so wide these young kids kill my golf courses. I think the impression of my golf courses is they always look harder [than they are.] “
The 16th hole at Crooked Stick, a few hundred yards from their Indiana home, is a long par 4 with deep fairway bunkering on the right and a pond guarding the green.
Dye had missed very few fairways on that perfect summer day, but he got greedy. He tried to hit a fade around the bunkers and came up short.
“I can’t hit a ball any better than that and it’s in the dumper,” he said with a faint smile.
He didn’t expect sympathy–or get any.
